Reading Day 2
Utopia and CatastropheBR #academic, #borges, #exclusion
‘I dreamed I was awakening from another dream -an uproar of chaos and cataclysms- into an unrecognizable room. Day was dawning: light suffused the room, outlining the foot of the wrought-iron bed, the upright chair, the closed door and windows, the bare table. I thought fearfully, “Where am I?” and I realized I didn’t know. I thought, “Who am I?” and I couldn’t recognize myself. My fear grew. I thought: This desolate awakening is in Hell, this eternal vigil will be my destiny. Then I really woke up, trembling.’ Jorge Luis Borges: The Duration of Hell (1929)
While catastrophe is a threshold; a line existing of minimum circumstances, below which existence becomes unbearable, utopia is the ideal you can never grasp, your constant upwards aim and direction, in an attempt to reach perfection. Why is only the negative polar reachable in its full form? Nothing can be perfect, but nothing can be totally imperfect either. Imperfections’ entirety includes perfection too, as truth includes lies in itself. The Bermuda Triangle, between catastrophe’s bottom line and utopia’s highpoint, is our only certainty, the space we exist in. ‘Beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial we are nobodies’ (Borges). Beyond our triangle only before and after exist, immaterial thoughts. If you were to escape the triangle, would you end up in an infinite space, a nothingness, and would that be a catastrophe? Feeling excluded can feel liberating, as you don’t have to care about remaining inside. Though, being excluded is catastrophic when you measure its consequences. To lose this longing of mind-numbing certainty is a risk in itself. In letting go of the grip, falling turns into weightlessness. Only the body
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